进化论

当时的欧洲，先是科学的发展导致了工业革命，而工业革命随后又反过来促进了科学的进步。各种科学发展迅猛，很快便让人觉得眼花缭乱、名目繁多，以致让人有些无所适从。在斯宾塞生活的时代，在英国最令人感到震撼的重大事件就得属进化论的横空出世了。

Herbert Spencer

I. Comte and Darwin

Meanwhile the Industrial Revolution, born of a little science, was stimulating science in return. Newton and Herschel had brought the stars to England, Boyle and Davy had opened the treasures of chemistry, Faraday was making the discoveries that would electrify the world, Rumford and Joule were demonstrating the transformability and equivalence of force and the conservation of energy. The sciences were reaching a stage of complexity which would make a bewildered world welcome a synthesis. But above all these intellectual influences that stirred England in the youth of Herbert Spencer was the growth of biology, and the doctrine of evolution. Science had been exemplarily international in the development of this doctrine: Kant had spoken of the possibility of apes becoming men; Goethe had written of "The Metamorphosis of Plants"; Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck had propounded the theory that species had evolved from simpler forms by the inheritance of the effects of use and disuse; and in 1830 St. Hilaire shocked Europe, and gladdened old Goethe, by almost triumphing against Cuvier in that famous debate on evolution which seemed like another Ernani, another revolt against classic ideas of changeless rules and orders in a changeless world.

In the eighteen-fifties evolution was in the air. Spencer expressed the idea, long before Darwin, in an essay on "The Development Hypothesis" (1852), and in his Principles of Psychology (1855). In 1858 Darwin and Wallace read their famous papers before the Linnaean Society; and in 1859 the old world, as the good bishops thought, crashed to pieces with the publication of the Origin of Species. Here was no mere vague notion of evolution, of higher species evolving somehow from lower ones; but a detailed and richly documented theory of the actual mode and process of evolution "by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life." In one decade all the world was talking about evolution. What lifted Spencer to the crest of this wave of thought was the clarity of mind which suggested the application of the evolution idea to every field of study, and the range of mind which brought almost all knowledge to pay tribute to his theory. As mathematics had dominated philosophy in the seventeenth century, giving to the world Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibnitz and Pascal; and as psychology had written philosophy in Berkeley and Hume and Condillac and Kant; so in the nineteenth century, in Schelling and Schopenhauer, in Spencer and Nietzsche and Bergson, biology was the background of philosophic thought. In each case the epochal ideas were the piece-meal production of separate men, more or less obscure; but the ideas are attached to the men who coördinated and clarified them, as the New World took the name of Amerigo Vespucci because he drew a map. Herbert Spencer was the Vespucci of the age of Darwin, and something of its Columbus too.

▍语言点

Industrial Revolution: 工业革命

treasure: n. 宝藏

electrify: vt. 给……充电

bewildered: adj. 眼花缭乱的

synthesis: n. 综合

stir: vt. 搅动

doctrine: n. 法则；教条

evolution: n. 进化论

Metamorphosis: 变形记

propounded: vt. 提出

inheritance: n. 遗传，继承

gladden: vt. 使某人开心

triumph: vi. 胜利

Ernani: 大获全胜

revolt: n. 反叛

changeless: adj. 不变的

bishop: n. 神甫；神职人员

vague: adj. 含糊

richly: adv. 详实地

natural selection: 自然选择

lift sb. to the crest of sth.: 将……推到巅峰

pay tribute to: 赞美

piece-meal: 零星的

coördinated: vt. 协调

clarify: vt. 澄清

the New World: 主要指美洲

Faraday (正确读音为：/ˈfærədei/)

Joule (正确读音为：/dʒuːl/)

welcome (口误)

exemplarily (正确读音为：/ɪɡzemp'lærɪlɪ/)

Lamarck (正确读音为：/ləˈmɑ:k/)

Hilaire (正确读音为：/ h ɪ ˈ l ɛər/)

Cuvier (正确读音为：/ˈkju:viei/)

Amerigo (口误，应为亚美利哥)